A mentally and physically exhausted Bobbie Jo Hottinger rested wearily on the sweat stained sheets of her cockroach infested, New York City motel room. It had been an emotionally battering whirlwind for the 23 year old mother of four as she tried to force herself to sleep over the sounds of drunk men wandering up and down the motel's corridor and the searing screech of sirens, every so often, from the Bronx street below.
Feeling the tears of her own self-loathing burn her eyeballs, Bobbie Jo silently sobbed, praying that the sounds of the urban jungle outside wouldn't wake her two boys and two girls as they slept restlessly on the floor beside her.
Less than two weeks earlier, Bobbie Jo had still been living in her hometown of Bristol, Tennessee, running the strip with her friends, making time with the truckers that frequented the I-81 truck stop on the outskirts of town and generally doing the best a country girl could do, to do as little as possible with her life.
The welfare checks that came ever month to help support her four kids combined with the occasional financial support she weaseled from her folks and the money she picked up for services rendered in the cabs of those tractor trailers kept Bobbie Jo from ever having to actively seek out a real job.
The fact that she had given birth to four kids in less than six years, all to different Fathers, might have seemed outlandish to the outside world, but for a nameless girl from small town America, she was just another aimless face in the crowd.
What had led Bobbie Jo from the comfort level she had established at home to the rodent and insect infested motel room over 600 miles away was a mistake in judgment she had made three years earlier. The fact that she had slept with more men than she could count was something that Bobbie Jo took a strange sense of pride in. The one glaring lapse in judgment she had made over the years however was sleeping with a handsome blonde boy, who at the time was 18.
That boy, Brian Kenner, had one certain trait that most of the men that Bobbie Jo hooked up with didn't, an actual chance at a decent future. Even though he had sown his wild oats, just like most of his classmates growing up, Brian was from a stable and well off family that engrained in him a belief that one day he would make something of himself.
When Brian had, by chance, met up with Bobbie Jo one night on the Bristol strip and then found himself in Room 118 of the Motel 6 back in the Summer of 1998, neither thought anything else other than a good time would come from it. Instead, the only time the two ever shared a bed resulted in the conception of Bobbie Jo's second child, her first daughter, who she named Noelle.
Despite the fact that Brian had initially begged Bobbie Jo to get an abortion, he warmed to the idea of Fatherhood despite the fact that Bobbie Jo wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. Brian's 'clean cut' image made her look bad in the eyes of the circle of friends she normally hung with, Bobbie Jo reasoned.
After finally caving in to the wishes of his parents and deciding he would never be able to make a dent with Bobbie Jo's warped mind, Brian chose to enlist in the Army.
With his two year commitment behind him, Brian used to GI Bill to help pay for his first year at the University of Tennessee. Even though there was an occasional swapping of photos and phone calls between Father and Daughter, the two never got a chance to spend any substantive time together until Brian returned to Bristol after finishing his Freshman year at college. It was then that Bobbie Jo's depraved lifestyle finally began to catch up with her.
Even though he had sent a letter a month earlier saying he would be back to see Noelle on the 10th of May, Brian was able to push his exams up to the start of the week so he could leave for Bristol a few days earlier to see his Daughter. What he found when he showed up early and unexpectedly at Bobbie Jo's trailer wounded him to the core.
In the three subsequent years since Brian and Bobbie Jo had conceived Noelle, Bobbie Jo had proceeded to give birth to two other children bringing her personal maternal tote board to four.
When Brian swung open the unlocked screen door of Bobbie Jo's trailer and proceeded to enter the ram shackled residence without knocking, he was immediately inundated by the overwhelming stench of fecal matter, urine and marijuana smoke. Holding his hand up to his nose the same way he was taught to in the Army in case of a tear gas attack, Brian quickly scanned his eyes across the poorly lit interior of the trailer until he locked eyes with Bobbie Jo and a teenage boy, each sitting half naked on the sofa with a joint between their lips.
His eyes burning, both from the putrid odor of the room as well as his own mushrooming anger, Brian instinctively looked to his right when he heard a baby start to cry and saw all four of Bobbie Jo's children, including Noelle, sitting off to the side, each one of them forced to wallow in their own filth as their Mother rested drunkenly in the arms of some nameless Stoner a few feet away.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!" Brian yelled, the veins in his neck straining grotesquely as he tried to keep from reaching out and choking the Mother of his child.
"FUCK... YOU," Bobbie Jo screamed back just as loud, if not slightly more disjointedly. "DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO KNOCK YOU SON OF A BITCH!!"
The pot smoking teenager Bobbie Jo had been gallivanting with on the sofa had quickly grabbed his shirt and shoes and beat a hasty retreat as Bobbie Jo and Brian stared each other down, sensing this was something he wanted no parts of.
For the better part of 30 seconds, Brian just wretched as he watched Bobbie Jo sitting on the sofa, dressed in nothing but a yanked down halter top that revealed her heavy, sagging breasts and a pair of way too short cut off jeans. Sickened by what he saw, Brian angrily spat on the ground at Bobbie Jo's bare feet then went to pick up his unbathed Daughter to give her a reassuring hug. Bobbie Jo somehow picked her limp and buzz laden body off the sofa and charged at Brian as he picked up Noelle.
As she laid in her New York City motel room, dazedly reliving that awful moment, Bobbie Jo winced in silence as the stinging smack Brian delivered to her still resonated across her still bruised but healing face.
* * * * *
Brian Kenner's older Brother, Tim, had been a deputy on Bristol's Police force for the past five years. When Brian had communicated to Tim the situation Bobbie Jo's four kids were forced to live in, Tim immediately placed a call to Social Services.
In the meantime, Bobbie Jo resisted the urge to place any assault charges against Brian for striking her, sensing he had the upper hand after catching her in such a compromising position. The fact that his Brother was a cop as well made Bobbie Jo feel as if the cards were indelibly stacked against her.
She had never thought for a moment that Brian would do anything so low as bring in Child Welfare to investigate her child rearing abilities. When two agents from Social Services showed up unannounced at her trailer early one Thursday Morning however, and saw for themselves the conditions she had subjected her four children to, Bobbie Jo sensed clearly the tide was turning against her.
In her paranoid haste to keep from having her kids taken away, Bobbie Jo pooled every last dollar she could and took her children to the bus station with the sole purpose of buying a one way ticket for as far away as she could.
Less than 24 hours later, Bobbie Jo and her two sons and two daughters looked out the Greyhound bus's window to see the New York City skyline tower above their morbidly stoic facades.
* * * * *
As Bobbie Jo rubbed away the combination of sweat and tears that coated her cheeks and listened to the sounds of her four kids' fitful sleep, the young woman made a desperate prayer to God that her children would not be tainted by the mess that her life had become.
Laying there in the humid darkness, Bobbie Jo tried her best to mentally detach herself from the brutal emotions that stabbed at her heart. In lieu of concentrating on those feelings however, all she was left with was the throbbing physical residue of what had happened to her earlier that night at work.
* * * * *
Upon arriving at the Port Authority two weeks earlier, with no money in her pocket except for the $20 bill and elderly couple had slipped her after sensing her dilemma on the bus, Bobbie Jo realized that finding a job, any job, would be a necessity if she didn't want to have to crawl back to Tennessee and potentially lose her children.
There thankfully happened to be a "Help Wanted... Start Immediately" sign in the window of a Dry Cleaners on the same block that Bobbie Jo found the first low rent motel that would take kids under the age of 16.
Hired on the spot when she went in to apply, Bobbie Jo experienced a double jolt of good fortune when an older woman, who lived down the hall from her in the motel offered to look after her four kids while Bobbie Jo worked the 4 pm to Midnight shift at Kim's Cleaners.
Still, the accumulated internal and external conflict that had built up around Bobbie Jo kept her from the one thing she so desperately needed, a good night's sleep.
Laying there listening to the sounds of her own raspy breathing mingle with the intimidating noises outside of her cramped quarters, Bobbie Jo could still feel the burning sensations of the bite marks on her neck and breasts that would surely develop into nasty black and blue hickeys by sunrise. She could also feel every muscle in her back and legs ache from the ridiculously rough treatment she had gotten earlier that night at work.
For nearly an hour, Bobbie Jo rested there reliving the depraved act she had been coerced into doing earlier that night until the only relief she could find was when her tingling and shaky fingers nestled warmly into the chestnut brown V of her hairy cunt.
* * * * *
The night has started out relatively the same as all the others had during her two week stint at Kim's Dry Cleaners. It wasn't until Bobbie Jo had snuck into the Boss's vacant office around 10 pm, during one of her breaks, to make a secret long distance call back to Bristol, to her best friend Cherise, to see what the climate was with Brian attempts to get Bobbie Jo's kids taken away, that she ran into problems. After Bobbie Jo hung up the phone and started to sneak back out of the darkened office. her night took a sudden and sharp detour.
Bobbie Jo's hastily concocted plan over the previous two weeks had been to use the phone in the Boss's office, long after Mr. Kim had gone home for the night, to call her friends back in Tennessee to determine if it was safe yet to return to Bristol with her kids.
Working the late evening shift, Bobbie Jo was relatively safe in feeling she could sneak in to use the phone, then sneak out undetected. Figuring she'd be on her way back home by the time the phone bill showed up at the business, Bobbie Jo was confident her little plan wouldn't be discovered until long after she had departed. Even if worse came to worse, she reasoned, she could quit that job and find another one before the phone bill showed up.
